ACELL & PRP: Stimulating Better Hair Growth Minneapolis, MN

At SMG we currently offer ACELL therapy as an adjunctive, intra-operative therapy for both the donor & recipient area to help improve survival and limit scarring. We will be adding PRP therapy summer of 2015 once we decide which of the multiple protocols that are being used gives the best result.

ACELL Extracellular Matrix

Acell is an extracellular matrix derived from biological material that contains a network of collagen , proteins, and growth factors. It also has been proven to be useful in wound healing in other areas of medicine. It contains growth factors and is known to recruit progenitor stem cells is felt to help in tissue regeneration.

ACELL POWDER

PRP (Platelet-Rich Plasma

PRP is an autologous (it comes from the patient) plasma that can contain anywhere from 1 to 8 times the physiologic platelet concentration. The process of obtaining PRP involves drawing blood from the patient after which it undergoes a centrifugation process where the platelets and plasma are separated from the red and white cells. This plasma is rich in growth factors, cytokines and chemokines which are essential for tissue repair and angiogenesis. PRP has been proven to aid in healing in other areas of medicine (dental, orthopedic, etc.

Currently hair transplant physicians use ACELL or PRP in one of two ways: 1) intra-operatively and 2) as a nonsurgical, stand-alone treatment.

Intra Operative Uses

Improve the Strip Donor Site: Both ACELL l & PRP have been placed in strip donor incision at the time of surgery in an attempt to promote better wound healing of these scars.

Improve the FUE Donor Site: Both ACELL & PRP have been applied to the multiple micro-punches left in the donor site after an FUE procedure. The hope is two- fold:

That the punches will heal quicker and possible with a lower incidence of “white dot” scars.

That some hair may regrow from the punch sites.( Auto-Cloning)With this scenario ACELL is hoped to recruit progenitor cells and stimulate re-growth of hair from stem cells left at the site of the punches. If this works it could increase to some degree the donor supply available with FUE

Improve Graft Survival in the recipient area. There are those that feel that better graft survival may occur if ACELLis applied to the grafts or injected into the recipient area at the time of surgery.

Non-Surgical Stand Alone Uses
Non-surgically, PRP& ACELL have been used to treat thinning, miniaturized hair by employing the meso-therapy technique of multiple superficial injections into the areas of thinning scalp. The hope is that a series of injections will stimulate miniaturized hairs to re-grow

DO THEY WORK
All these potential uses are very exciting!!!!
All these potential uses are also very controversial with very few studies so far to prove they work on a consistent basis.
However there has been enough evidence that more studies need to be done and the careful use of these adjuncts in selected patients can be warranted. However truthful disclosure of the limited nature of the knowledge is important.

“Thank you very much for your
attention. I am very happy with the results of the surgery. After 3 months only I already have full hair coverage in all the affected areas and don’t need to use the hair clips like I used to do for many years. Please give my beast regards to Dr. Shapiro and the team...”Read More

WHAT IS FOLLICULAR UNIT EXTRACTION?

Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) is a method of obtaining donor hair for Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT) where individual follicular units are harvested directly from the donor area, without the need for a linear incision. With the FUE technique, a .8mm to 1 mm punch is used to make a small circular incision in the skin around the upper part of the follicular unit which is then extracted directly from the scalp. [ Read More ]